The American Journey, a cornerstone series for the U.S. History market, successfully blends the coverage of political and social histories of our great nation throughout the series. With this focus, the authors show that our attempt to live up to our American ideals is an ongoing journey. This journey, while still a work in progress, is increasingly more inclusive of different groups and ideas.

The path that led the authors to The American Journey began in the classroom with their students. The goal of this text is to make American history accessible to students. The key to that goal--the core of the book--is a strong, clear narrative and a positive theme of The American "Journey." American history is a compelling story that the authors tell in an engaging, forthright way, while providing students with tools to help them absorb that story and put it into context. This text combines political and social history, to fit the experience of particular groups into the broader perspective of the American past, to give voice to minor and major players alike, because the history of America is in the stories of its people.

About the Author&colon;

David Goldfield received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Maryland. Since 1982 he has been Robert Lee Bailey Professor of History at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte. He is the author or editor of thirteen books on various aspects of southern and urban history. Two of his works—Cotton Fields and Skyscrapers: Southern City and Region, 1607-1980 (1982) and Black, White, and Southern: Race Relations and Southern Culture, 1940 to the Present (1990)—received the Mayflower Award for nonfiction and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in history. His most recent book is Still Fighting the Civil War: The American South and Southern History (2002). When he is not writing history, Dr. Goldfield applies his historical craft to history museum exhibits, voting rights cases, and local planning and policy issues.

Carl Abbott is a professor of Urban Studies and planning at Portland State University. He taught previously in the history departments at the University of Denver and Old Dominion University, and held visiting appointments at Mesa College in Colorado and George Washington University. He holds degrees in history from Swarthmore College and the University of Chicago. He specializes in the history of cities and the American West and serves as co-editor of the Pacific Historical Review. His books include The New Urban America: Growth and Politics in Sunbelt Cities (1981, 1987), The Metropolitan Frontier: Cities in the Modern American West (1993), Planning a New West: The Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area (1997), and Political Terrain: Washington, D.C. from Tidewater Town to Global Metropolis (1999). He is currently working on a comprehensive history of the role of urbanization and urban culture in the history of western North America.

Virginia DeJohn Anderson is Associate Professor of History at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She received her B.A. from the University of Connecticut. As the recipient of a Marshall Scholarship, she earned an M.A. degree at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. Returning to the United States, she received her A.M. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University. She is the author of New England’s Generation: The Great Migration and the Formation of Society and Culture in the Seventeenth Century (1991) and several articles on colonial history, which have appeared in such journals as the William and Mary Quarterly and the New England Quarterly. She is currently finishing a book entitled Creatures of Empire: People and Animals in Early America.

Jo Ann E. Argersinger received her Ph.D. from George Washington University and is Professor of History at Southern Illinois University. A recipient of fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, she is a historian of social, labor, and business policy. Her publications include Toward a New Deal in Baltimore: People and Government in the Great Depression (1988) and Making the Amalgamated: Gender, Ethnicity, and Class in the Baltimore Clothing Industry (1999).

Peter H. Argersinger received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin and is Professor of History at Southern Illinois University. He has won several fellowships as well as the Binkley-Stephenson Award from the Organization of American Historians. Among his books on American political and rural history are Populism and Politics (1974), Structure, Process, and Party (1992), and The Limits of Agrarian Radicalism (1995). His current research focuses on the political crisis of the 1890s.

William L. Barney is Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A native of Pennsylvania, he received his B.A. from Cornell University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University. He has published extensively on nineteenth century U.S. history and has a particular interest in the Old South and the coming of the Civil War. Among his publications are The Road to Secession (1972), The Secessionist Impulse (1974), Flawed Victory (1975), The Passage of the Republic (1987), and Battleground for the Union (1989). He is currently finishing an edited collection of essays on nineteenth-century America and a book on the Civil War. Most recently, he has edited A Companion to 19th-Century America (2001) and finished The Civil War and Reconstruction: A Student Companion (2001).

Robert M. Weir is Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at the University of South Carolina. He received his B.A. from Pennsylvania State University and his Ph.D. from Case Western Reserve University. He has taught at the University of Houston and, as a visiting professor, at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom. His articles have won prizes from the Southeastern Society for the Study of the Eighteenth Century and the William and Mary Quarterly. Among his publications are Colonial South Carolina: A History, “The Last of American Freemen”: Studies in the Political Culture of the Colonial and Revolutionary South, and, more recently, a chapter on the Carolinas in the new Oxford History of the British Empire (1998).